Anthony Burgess Quotes - Page 3

Colonialism. The enforced spread of the rule of reason. But who is going to spread it among the colonizers?

I chart a little first-list of names, rough synopsis of chapters, and so on. But one daren't overplan; so many things are generated by the sheer act of writing.

Senseless violence is a prerogative of youth, which has much energy but little talent for the constructive.

There is a satisfactory boniness about grammar which the flesh of sheer vocabulary requires before it can become a vertebrate and walk the earth.

I wrote much because I was paid little. I had no great desire to leave a literary name behind me.

Writers are rarely their own best critics, nor are critics.

A man can write one book that can be great, but this doesn't make him a great writer-just the writer of a great book. . . I think a writer has to extend very widely, as well as plunge very deep, to be a great novelist.

If you believe in an unseen Christ, you will believe in the unseen Christlike potential of others.

But don't think that it's a system or a culture or a state or a person that does the letting down. It's our expectations that let us down. It begins in the warmth of the womb and the discovery that it's cold outside. But it's not the cold's fault that it's cold.

A work of fiction should be, for its author, a journey into the unknown, and the prose should convey the difficulties of the journey.

...the essential intention is the real sin. A man who cannot choose ceases to be a man.

Life is, of course, terrible.

The writer's life seethes within but not without.

The not-self cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self.

As a chamber hung round about with looking-glasses represents the face upon every turn, thus all the world doth the mercy and the bounty of God; though that be visible, yet it discovers an invisible God and his invisible properties.

Hitler was a teetotalitarian.

Where do I come into all of this? Am I just some animal or dog?' And that started them off govoreeting real loud and throwing slovos at me. So I creeched louder still, creeching: 'Am I just to be like a clockwork orange?

All novels are experimental.

The unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon.

In two thousand years all our generals and politicians may be forgotten, but Einstein and Madame Curie and Bernard Shaw and Stravinsky will keep the memory of our age alive.

Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through.

Ignorance and poverty are the best condiments for the great feast of the world, but the inexperienced and poor are never invited to it.

What critics often ask for is the impossible, though this may be a salutary means of extending the borders of art.

Literature is all, or mostly, about sex.

Life's only choosing when to die. Life's a big postponement because the choice is so difficult. It's a tremendous relief not to have to choose.